Fucking great. The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) has launched a new campaign against DJs in an attempt to control copyright infringement. They have already confiscated $100,000’s worth of mix CDs from independent record stores across the US.
So now they're persecuting the DJs as well as the customers. Fucking idiots.

Dang that was hectic. On wednesday afternoon at about 16:00, my boss "persuaded" me to go to Memphis to support a customer there. Thursday morning, up at the crack of dawn for the flights (via Denver). Arrived in Memphis about 15:00 then pulled off a 10 hour shift in the Fedex facility. Bed. Hotel right next to runway, so woken up again at 4:00. Alarm went off at 6:00, back to Fedex for another 10 hour stint (no lunch). Celebratory meal at the Rendevous rib-house. Back to the hotel. Alarm off at 6:00 this morning, hopped the planes back home. Lunch, spent the afternoon patching up the roof and putting up heat tape on the eaves. Finished, went into the office. Typed up site report, filed expenses, deposited changed files on the FTP server. Washed car.

Yay. Let's hear it for mother nature. And Utah power. Because of the power outage during the heavy snowfall in December, a massive wad of ice built up on the back of our roof. The temperature has been below freezing for 24 days and last night, it went above freezing. And the ice started to melt. Into the kitchen through one of the light fixtures. So I spent most of last night and all this morning up a ladder hacking the ice with a trowel and trying to thaw it with ice-melt. I got a lot of it off, but the stuff which had already backed-up under the eaves is still melting into the kitchen. Hopefully it aint doing too much damage but it will be spring before I can find out for sure. :-(

We went snowmobiling for the first time yesterday. Ace fun. I fell off / turned over a couple of times but once I got the hang of it, it was great. In the end, I figured out that just stuffing the throttle full-open and sliding side-to-side on the saddle was the best way to drive the things in corners.

Spirit (MER-A) has been placed in 'cripple' mode. Turns out the flash memory is causing problems so the ground crew managed to tell it to ignore that memory and shut down. It had been rebooting and rebooting trying to get running again, and 130 reboots later, all the battery life was dead. It's now recovering quietly, solar panels out, recharging in cripple mode.

Meanwhille, Opportunity (MER-B) slammed down last night and rolled to a stop upside down. By the time we got up this morning, they'd righted it, deflated the airbags and opened up the lander. I'll be damned if that rover doesn't seem to be working perfectly too. They got the first slew of pictures back from it last night via Mars Global Surveyor.

And finally, the inversion has been washed away here in SLC, and replaced with low cloud and 3 inches of fresh snow. So I got to use the beast again this morning on the driveway and paths. Sweet!